The South Side of Chicago Made Him Pope

How a boy from Bronzeville, raised on daily Mass and Chicago grit, became the first American to wear the white cassock.

A new mural featuring Pope Leo in a Chicago Bulls jersey emerged in Rome last week.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of deeply reported essays that together offer the most comprehensive portrait yet of Pope Leo’s early life and formation.

Why? Because if Leo XIV is going to be the world’s most credible counterweight to Trump during this defining moment in American and global history, then we deserve to know the nearly 70 years Bob Prevost lived before becoming the 267th leader of the Catholic Church.

These pieces take time and care to produce — so the remainder of this article, and the rest in the series, will be available exclusively to paying subscribers.

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Long before he waved from the balcony at St. Peter’s, Robert Prevost answered the bells of St. Mary of the Assumption on East 137th Street.

His earliest memories are of Chicago’s South Side — the sturdy brick house his parents bought in Dolton, the multiethnic streets of Riverdale, and the tight-knit parish community that wrapped around them like a second family.

Their home was a sacred place: as he later recalled, “My parents prayed the rosary together their whole lives everyday Mildred would even wake her sons for 6:30 a.m. Mass each day, reminding them that “Jesus is your best friend, and Mass was a way to find that friend”

Back then, he was just Bob Prevost, one of three brothers, attending Catholic school, singing in the choir, and serving Mass.

But the path to the papacy was already being laid — brick by brick, blessing by blessing — by the values instilled in him at home.